Jerome Bruner
...Sciences that sparked the curriculum reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. His book, The Process of Education (1961), continues to be one of the movement’s major guides. In the 1980s, Bruner became increasingly interested in the nature and uses of thought. Turning to law, he began to study the nature and uses of narrative in litigation, adjudication, and testimony. All of his studies led to his famous theory of cognitive growth. Cognitive growth is the development of human intellectual functioning from infancy to such perfection as it may reach, and is shaped by a series of technological advances in the use of mind. He has remained as a research professor, spending a major portion of his time as an adjunct professor at the Law School exploring the interaction of cultural and legal practice. He is married to Carol Fleisher Feldman who was a collaborative researcher with Bruner while The Culture of Education was written. He has two children and several grandchildren, and lives in Greenwich Village, New York. The first main point of Bruner’s theory on cognitive growth is that he believed that as children develop, their actions are constrained less by immediate stimuli. The cognitive process mediates the relationship between stimulus and response so that learners might maintain the same response in a changing environment or perform different responses in the same environment, depending on what they consider adaptive (thoughts, beliefs). Environments can slow down the learning process or speed it up. Bruner felt that knowledge was best acquired when students were allowed to discover it on their own. The second main point on Bruner’s cognitive theory is that he viewed learning as an ongoing process of developing a cognitive structure for representing and interacting with new information. According to one of his principles of cognitive development, learning is possible because events are internalized into a “storage system” that amounts to an organized mode. This “storage system” stores the information perceived and interpreted in the form of imagery, con...